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Come Away; Poverty's Catching (By Jumoke Verissimo)

Jumoke

Writing is a part of Jumoke Verissimo, not just because of her academic background in Language and Arts, but more because of a passion she developed ove time. And quite significant about her works, is the fact that she expresses strong ties to her environment. She has featured in several literary events where she read from her books and did presentations of her poems.

Book excerpts.

The housesin Bashir
Compound were built with mud, so closely together they constellated the few
acres of land on which they stood. Neighbours could hear the conversations
being held in the next house without listening too hard, and sometimes they
threw greetings to one another without leaving their rooms. The walls of every
house in the compound were pasted with Portland cement. Several years' layers
had given the walls a blend of auburns and dull whites. Some houses in the
compound wore thin coats of paint, but this did little to cover the poor
plastering or the scrawling made with charcoal by little children learning to
write.

The landlords were great-grandchildren of Amidu
Bashir, a settler who died several years back as an Aso-Oke fabric merchant.
They "renovated" the place annually, making the compound appear like
makeshift hen houses built by rural farmers. The roofs, made of second-hand
rusty iron sheets from the black market, had so many holes in them that the sun
shone through and dotted the floors. The landlords replaced the roofs only if
the holes were big enough for rats to pass through.

The residents earned barren wages. They were people
who had migrated to the city from rural areas looking for work, illegal
immigrants from neighboring countries, students who couldn't afford better
accommodation. The area was strategically buried with the dreams of many in the
heart of the bustling city of Lagos, and only those who sought poverty or were
a victim of it found their way to Bashir Compound.

I lived in building number nine. It was a house with
twelve small rooms divided by a very narrow passage into six on each side. The
structure of my house and the others like it were referred to as
"Face-me-I-face-you," because the doors of the rooms were directly
opposite each other. Usually, every Face-me-I-face-you was expected to have a
communal toilet and bathroom, which all the rooms in the house shared, but we
had no toilet or bathroom in Bashir Compound. We bathed in a stall made from
corrugated iron sheets carefully arranged into a box. The box leaned against an
abandoned building that stank always because it was used as a garbage dump and
a burial yard for malnourished children and the aborted babies of teenage
girls. When the Sanitation Officers demolished our toilet, we started throwing
our shit in the abandoned building, too.

The day the Sanitation Officers came, after
demolishing the toilet, they locked our house with a big Diamond padlock. Our
landlords disappeared for fear of being mobbed by their tenants, and in their
absence we wasted our frustration on cursing and sighing. We camped in
different corners of the compound like refugees expecting relief, sleeping
under the trees because no one else in the compound was willing to take anyone
into their already overcrowded rooms. Those who could not find a place under a
tree leaned against the wall of the house in frustration. We battled mosquitoes
and soldier ants, who bit unusually hard that night. It was as if they had
trained for the task of sucking us dry of our blood. Parents of little children
didn't sleep, staying up to brush ants and mosquitoes from their children's
skin.

I couldn't sleep. I spent the night listening to the
snores of the others and driving mosquitoes away from a little boy whose mother
had an amputated arm.

The next day
when it was past noon, our landlords came with a key and opened the house. No
one fought with them. We were too tired to start anything. Quietly, we entered
our rooms and slept with heavy hearts. Our landlords had been able to collect
the key from the Sanitation Officers by giving them a payoff, then promising to
build a hygienic toilet by the end of that month. That toilet was never built.